After you have picked yourself up from the floor in shock, you might have noticed a few changes around here:

1. You are no longer being greeted by the still-store of my cheesy Eyes-n-Teeth expression on the last post. No matter how thankful you are for this, you are not nearly as thankful as I am. Really. It haunts my dreams, that still-store.

2. The banner now reads “Prepare to Meet Your Juris Doctorate.” This is not a sign of permanent change to come. ‘mouse posted this on the day I graduated from law school this past May, partly to congratulate me for making it through, but mostly to prod me into waking the blog back up. He tried that a few times, poor ‘mouse. At one point, he even referred to me as a “former blogger,” and the more I insisted otherwise ("DUDE, I’m not a FORMER blogger. Former bloggers let their server space subscriptions and domains lapse. My site is still LIVE. I just need to WAIT until I have better CONTENT to post, AWRIGHT?"), the more he would reply, simply, “Okay...Former Blogger.” And yet I still did not rise to the bait. And he *still* gave me a present for graduation. What a nice guy.

3. Really, though, it’s all about getting Eyes-n-Teeth off the front page.

Okay, not really. It was never my plan to disappear for two years. I figured I’ve have plenty of good stuff to share, especially because I was done with the boot camp that is the first year of law school. We had settled into our new place in California, and I was getting more comfortable with working on a completely different stove. What could possibly go wrong?

While nothing went wrong, I’d be fibbing if I said that life got easier. There’s an ancient law school cliche that says when you’re a 1L (first-year law student), they scare you to death; when you’re a 2L, they work you to death; and when you’re a 3L, they bore you to death. I can attest to the truth of the 2L portion. I had survived the first year of law school. I could pick my elective classes. Since I hadn’t actually flunked out of school, as I’d feared I would, I felt more comfortable about joining extracurricular clubs and serving on committees. I was so comfortable, in fact, that I might have overextended myself. By the time 3L rolled around, I promised myself that I would scale back. Not so many clubs this year. Pick a club, maybe serve as an officer of the club, don’t load up on too many demanding classes. Let myself be bored to death, in other words.

Ha bloody ha. Even if I had managed to scale back (note: three bar classes and a Supreme Court seminar in a single semester is not an example of “scaling back"), I had forgotten to include into the equation the amount of time I would prepare getting ready for the bar, taking the MPRE (a multiple-choice test on legal ethics that is a requirement of bar admission in every state), submitting information for my state and federal background check, and looking for a job after graduation. During my final semester of classes, I added a clerkship at Transgender Law Center in San Francisco, which was brilliant, inspiring and one of the best things I ever did with my life—but which also added 16 hours of work and 7-9 hours of commuting on top of a full-time schedule. I also remember writing a lot of seminar papers, although I’ll be damned if I can remember any of them right now.

Then came graduation madness, bar prep madness, and actual bar exam madness, which technically does not end until six weeks from tomorrow night, when we get our results. Considering that the bar exam took place during the last week in July, that’s a lot of time to lose to madness.

The past two months have been a mix of job hunting, fellowship applications, freelancing, and rainmaking for more freelancing. I won’t fib: it’s been a little stressful. It should have been the perfect time for writing, too, but I wasted a lot of writing time worrying about how to keep the bills paid. If you have ever read Keep the Aspidistra Flying by George Orwell, you know what I mean. (If you haven’t read it, what are you waiting for? Go ahead and read it! It’s a quick read, and it will make you glad not to be the hero.) I spent more than a few days on my living room floor, urging myself to go to the gym, to get outside, to call some friends for lunch, *anything*. More often than not, I sat on the floor, and obsessed over whether I was gaining weight. Because that’s a useful way to solve problems, obviously.

Of course I couldn’t live like this forever. Last week I attended a Bloggers’ Night Out with a few Bay Area blogging luminaries, including the magnificent Grace Davis, who hosted me when I came to California for the very first time, trying to decide whether to go to Northeastern or Santa Clara for law school. Just having friends with whom to talk shop cheered me considerably, and suggested that maybe my best writing days weren’t behind me after all. This week, Lloyd and I were able to solve a financial issue that had been dogging us all summer—and we did it without having to file bankruptcy, which is a great relief to both of us. This morning, while I was still contemplating our good fortune over this, a letter arrived from the law school. I’ve been awarded a graduate fellowship, and will be working with a professor I really like. It won’t take me completely out of job hunting and freelancing madness, but it will give me the opportunity to think for a living, which is exactly what I wanted from this adventure.

p.s. In other news, Lloyd and I adopted a cat, and I learned how to make cheese. Of course the full tales of both will be told. I can’t give it all away in one post, after all.